The government has exceeded its target for cutting spending on what it calls waste and inefficiency by saving £5.5bn last year, according to figures published on Thursday.

The savings, which range from reducing the cost for toner cartridges to axing civil service jobs, will be welcomed as an alternative to making deeper cuts to spending on front line services as the government struggles to lower the annual spending deficit and bring down public debt.

"Because our controls on spending are working well and saving unprecedented amount of money, we are determined they'll be a permanent feature of good governance," said Maude before admitting that it would be impossible to bind all future governments and civil servants to such a penny-counting approach.

Last year's savings included a reduction in civil servant salary costs of £1.5bn, a reduction of 85% in use of outside consultants, and a saving of nearly £400m from freezing much of the government's marketing and advertising budget.

The £5.5bn savings claimed for the year to March 2012, audited by the National Audit Office, exceeds the £5bn prediction by Maude, who said the year's saving was equivalent to £500 for every working household that pays tax, or 250,000 junior nurses or 1.6m primary school places.

The latest figures does not take account of the short-term spending needed to achieve the bigger cuts, but also excludes wider cost savings, for example the lower back-office cost of employing fewer civil servants, said the Cabinet Office. Some of the £3.75bn savings in the first 10 months of government will have been carried through and be counted again in last year's figures, others will not, said Maude.

He also used this as an opportunity to attack the Labour leader and former cabinet secretary Ed Miliband for addressing the efficiency question. When the coalition took power in 2010, said Maude, the government did not know who its biggest suppliers were, some parts of government were paying seven times the price for toner cartridges than others, and central government operated out of 115 separate buildings in the city of Bristol alone.

"The question we have to ask is why were these savings never made before," he added.

Maude admitted that ministers could not be "100%" confident the cuts would not affect front-line services by taking away back-room support, but said many cuts were in what government pays for continuing goods and services. For example, major suppliers have been forced to renegotiate contracts at lower prices, saving £500,000 last year, and civil servants are being moved out of rented offices and into under-used government properties when the rental leases expire, saving nearly £200m in 2011-12.

Part of the cabinet minister's future plans to reduce costs are to ask major suppliers, again, to cut prices for the government as their biggest and most credit-worthy buyer, and to get more public services delivered on-line, for example the DVLA, which currently gets two articulated lorries full of post every day.

"You can't be absolutely 100%, but where we're making savings, in for example suppliers in general, what we're doing is simplifying taking out money being spent unnecessarily, and making sure it's spent better," said Maude.